Just weeks after his inauguration as US president, it is clear that Donald Trump is making a further bold claim on power, one that goes beyond the executive orders that are rightly drawing so much attention. He is reinventing the royal fiat by novel means: the rule-by-tweet, or “twiat”. This move is not an extension of popular democracy, but its enemy, and it needs to be resisted.

We are becoming used to Trump’s new way not just of sustaining a political campaign, but of making policy. We wake up to news of another state, corporation, institution or individual caught in the crossfire of his tweets. Corporations and investors are setting up “Twitter Response Units” and “Trump Triggers” in case the next tweet is aimed at them.

The process is so alien to the ways of making policy that have evolved over decades in complex democracies that it is tempting to dismiss it as just funny or naive. But that would be a huge mistake.

A tweet of Trump’s opinion at any moment on a particular issue is just that: an expression of the temporary opinion of one person, albeit one with his hands on more power-levers than almost any other person in the world.

Trump’s opinions at any moment are subject to change.Sasha Kimel/flickr

Such expressions matter, for sure, to Trump’s Twitter followers. But, although one might be forgiven for thinking otherwise, they do not (at 23 million) constitute a significant proportion of the world’s population, or even a large proportion of the US population.

The king holds court

A Trump tweet only becomes news if it is reported as news. And it only starts to become policy if those who interpret policy, including the media, start to treat this news as policy. Until then, the Trump tweet remains at most a claim on power.

But once key institutions treat it as if were already an enactment of power, it quickly becomes one. Worse, it inaugurates a whole new way of doing power whose compatibility with democracy and global peace is questionable.

Imagine you are a diplomat, trying to schedule a meeting for yourself, or your political master, with Trump in a few weeks’ time. Is it sensible for you to rely on the confidentiality of the meeting? Could a poorly chosen phrase or look – or indeed your most carefully argued reasoning – provoke a tweet that publicly mocks your whole strategy?

How do you deal with a figure who claims the power to broadcast on his own terms his gut reactions to whatever you say or propose? Yes, you can tweet back, but that is already to give up on the quiet space of discussion that was once diplomacy’s refuge.

The impact of rule-by-tweet is potentially profound: above all, on policy, whether global or domestic, legal or commercial. A new type of power is being claimed and, it seems, recognised: the power, by an individual’s say-so, to make things happen, the twiat. Just the sort of power that revolutions were fought to abolish.

If Trump is the putative Tweet King, who are his courtiers? Surely they’re the mainstream media institutions that regularly report Trump’s tweets as if they were policy.

If a medieval king’s courtiers refused to pass on his word to the wider world, its impact changed. While courtiers could be replaced overnight, contemporary media corporations cannot (for now at least). So why should the media act as if they were Trump’s courtiers?

We must not underestimate the short-term pressure on media corporations to conform to Trump’s claim on power. For sure, there will be an audience if they report Trump’s tweets, and their financial need to grab audiences wherever they can has never been greater.

But, if news values still mean something, they refer not only to financial imperatives, but to what should count as news. And norms about news must have some relation to what passes for acceptable in a democracy rather than an autocracy.

Why is the ‘twiat’ anti-democratic?

Some might say: Trump’s tweets are just the new way of doing democracy, “get with the program” (in the words of Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer). But, as the grim history of mid-20th-century Europe shows, authoritarian grabs on power only ever worked because their anti-democratic means were accepted by those around them as a novel way of “doing democracy”.

White House spokesman Sean Spicer says officials must ‘get with the program’ or go.

The “twiat” is anti-democratic for two reasons. First, it claims a power (to name individuals, pronounce policy, and condemn actions) against which there is no redress. Its work is done once uttered from the mouth of the “king”.

Second, and more subtly, allowing such power back into political decision-making undermines the slower, more inclusive forms of discussion and reflection that gives modern political democratic institutions their purpose and purchase in the first place.

Trump’s claim to a new form of charismatic power through Twitter is, in part, the flip-side of the damaged legitimacy of today’s democratic process. But, instead of curing that problem, it closes the door on it. The presidential tweeting ushers us into a new space that is no longer recognisable as democratic: a space where complex policy becomes not just too difficult but unnecessary, although its substitutes can still be tweeted.

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2 weeks agoby sydneydemocracyProfessor Baogang He, Alfred Deakin Professor, Chair in International Relations, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts & Education, Deakin University and Professor John Keane interrogate authoritarianism and democracy at ACRI UTS

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A closer look at the way politics has changed
Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two

Event Details

A closer look at the way politics has changed

Authoritarian populists have disrupted politics in many societies, as seen in the U.S. and the UK. This event brings together two leading scholars to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Authoritarian populist parties have gained votes and seats in many countries, and entered government in states as diverse as Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Switzerland. Across Europe, their average share of the vote in parliamentary elections remains limited but it has more than doubled since the 1960s and their share of seats tripled. Even small parties can still exert tremendous ‘blackmail’ pressure on governments and change the policy agenda, as demonstrated by UKIP’s role in catalyzing Brexit.

The danger is that populism undermines public confidence in the legitimacy of liberal democracy while authoritarianism actively corrodes its principles and practices. It also increases the resolve of authoritarian regimes around the world. This public forum sets out to explain the growth and character of these regimes and the polarisation over the cultural cleavage dividing social liberals and social conservatives in the electorates, and how these differences of values translate into support for authoritarian-populist parties and leaders in the U.S. and Europe, and elsewhere. The forum highlights the dangers to liberal democracy arising from these developments and what could be done to mitigate the risks.

This event brings together Professor Pippa Norris and Professor John Keane to discuss their new books and the power of populist authoritarianism.

Professor Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Professor John Keane will discuss his new book When trees fall, monkeys scatter.

The Speakers:

Pippa Norris will discuss her new book Cultural Backlash: The Rise of Populist Authoritarianism. Pippa is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for more than a quarter century. She is ARC Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project. Her research compares public opinion and elections, political institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide. She is ranked the 4th most cited political scientist worldwide, according to Google scholar. Major honors include, amongst others, the Skytte prize, the Karl Deutsch award, and the Sir Isaiah Berlin award. Her current work focuses on a major research project, www.electoralintegrityproject.com, established in 2012 and also a new book with Ronald Inglehart “Cultural Backlash” analyzing support for populist-authoritarianism.

John Keane will discuss his new book When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter: rethinking democracy in China. He is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), and Distinguished Professor at Peking University. He is renowned globally for his creative thinking about democracy. He is the Director and co-founder of the Sydney Democracy Network. He has contributed to The New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Harper’s, the South China Morning Post and The Huffington Post. His online column ‘Democracy field notes’ appears regularly in the London, Cambridge- and Melbourne­-based The Conversation. Among his best-known books are the best-selling Tom Paine: A political life (1995), Violence and Democracy (2004), Democracy and MediaDecadence (2013) and the highly acclaimed full-scale history of democracy, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009). His most recent books are A Short History of the Future of Elections (2016) and When Trees Fall, Monkeys Scatter (2017), and he is now completing a new book on the global spread of despotism.

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Speaker: Professor Gerry Stoker, University of Southampton
Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this

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Some contemporary democracies appear plagued by anti-politics, a set of negative attitudes held towards politicians and the political process. In this seminar Gerry Stoker explains how and why anti-political sentiment has grown among British citizens over the last half-century drawing on research about to be published in a Cambridge University Press book co-authored with Nick Clarke, Will Jennings and Jonathan Moss. The book offers a range of conceptual developments to help explore how citizens think about politics and the issue of negativity towards politics and uses responses to public opinion surveys alongside a unique data source-the diaries, reports and letters collected by Mass Observation. The book reveals that anti-politics has grown in scope and intensity when seen through the lens of a long view of the issue stretching back over multiple decades. Such growth is explained by citizens’ changing images of ‘the good politician’ and changing modes of political interaction between politicians and citizens. The seminar will conclude by placing these findings in a broader comparative context and exploring the implications for efforts to reform and improve democratic politics.

Chair: Dr Thomas Wynter

Discussant: Professor Ariadne Vromen

Time

(Tuesday) 11:45 am - 1:30 pm

Location

Room 276

Merewether Building, University of Sydney http://sydney.edu.au/arts/about/maps.shtml?locationID=[[H04]]

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Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against

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Human rights are in freefall across a number of countries in South East Asia. Last year, the Burmese military carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya Muslims in northern Rakhine State causing more than 650,000 Rohingyas to flee to neighboring Bangladesh. Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s murderous “war on drugs” has claimed more than 12,000 victims, predominantly the urban poor, including children. And the Cambodian government’s broad political crackdown in 2017 targeting the political opposition, independent media and human rights groups has effectively extinguished the country’s flickering democratic system at the expense of basic rights.

Australia’s 2017 White Paper includes the goals of “promoting an open, inclusive and prosperous Indo–Pacific region in which the rights of all states are respected” as well as the need to protect and promote the international rules based order. So what role does Australia play in addressing these problems and what more could the Australian government be doing?

To discuss these matters, we are delighted to welcome Elaine Pearson.

Elaine Pearson is the Australia Director at Human Rights Watch. Based in Sydney, she works to influence Australian foreign and domestic policies in order to give them a human rights dimension. She regularly briefs journalists, politicians and government officials, appears on television and radio programs, testifies before parliamentary committees and speaks at public events. She is an adjunct lecturer in law at the University of New South Wales. From 2007 to 2012 she was the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division based in New York.

Prior to joining Human Rights Watch, Elaine worked for the United Nations and various non-governmental organizations in Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kathmandu and London. She is an expert on migration and human trafficking issues and sits on the board of the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women. Pearson holds degrees in law and arts from Australia’s Murdoch University and obtained her Master’s degree in public policy at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

She writes frequently for publications including Harper’s Bazaar, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal.

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Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way

Event Details

Although Michel Foucault never refers explicitly to the problematic of political theology, his genealogical analyses of the mechanisms of power in secular modernity reveal their religious origins and the way they emerge out of ecclesiastical institutions and practices. However, I will suggest that Foucault’s contribution to political theology in a sense turns the paradigm on its head and signals a radical departure from the Schmittian model.

Foucault does not seek to sanctify power and authority in modernity, but rather to disrupt their functioning and consistency by identifying their hidden origins, unmasking their contingency and indeterminacy, and bringing before our gaze historical alternatives. Furthermore, Foucault introduces to the debate around political theology something that was entirely missing from it – the idea of the subject. The notion of the ‘confessing subject’ – the individual who, from earliest Christian times, has been taught to confess his secrets and thus form a truth about himself – is central to Foucault’s concerns, as are the ethical strategies through which the subject might constitute himself in alternative ways that allow a greater degree of autonomy. And while in the past, religious institutions and practices, particularly the Christian pastorate, have sought to render the subject obedient and governable, at other times, including in modernity, religious ideas have been a source of disobedience, revolt and what Foucault calls ‘counter-conducts’. It is here that I will develop the idea of ‘political spirituality’, showing how this notion can operate as a radical counter-point to political theology.

About the speaker:

Saul Newman is Professor of Political Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London and currently a Visiting Professor at the Sydney Democracy Network. His research is in continental political thought and contemporary political theory. Mostly known for his research on postanarchism, he also works on questions of sovereignty, human rights, as well as on the thought of the nineteenth century German individualist anarchist, Max Stirner. His most recent work is on political theology and post-secular politics, and he has a new book forthcoming with Polity called Political Theology: a Critical Introduction.

Time

(Thursday) 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm

Location

Seminar Room 498

Merewether Building, University of Sydney

Organizer

Department of Government and International Relationsmadeleine.pill@sydney.edu.au